The son of a lawyer became ennobled in the school of Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen Bernhard become a major expressive of the small German-Borussian historiography in the 19th Century. In 1875 he became director of the Prussian State Archives. Heinrich von Sybel laid as the father of the “Historical Magazine” as well as promoters of the “Monumenta Historica Germaniae” and the “Acta Borrussica” deep journalistic and editorial marks, which can be traced to the present historical knowledge …
Heinrich Karl Ludolf von Sybel was on 2 Born in Dusseldorf in December 1817.
His father was the lawyer Ferdinand Philipp Heinrich von Sybel (1781-1870), who had been transferred to the peerage in 1831. The family home was for the nobility and the educated middle of Düsseldorf a cultural and social center. With attending school in 1834 Sybel went to Berlin where he studied at the University of Leopold von Ranke’s history. In 1838 he received his doctorate. He received the Habilitation in 1840 at the University of Bonn. Sybel 1844 there was also a professor, which he traded a year later to a professorship at the University of Marburg. In addition to his academic activities, the history professor and politically motivated, as he was active before the 1848 revolution in the liberal movement of Hesse.
During the Revolution, 1848 Sybel was sitting in the Frankfurt Pre-Parliament and 1848/49 in the national assembly at Cassel. Here he made himself a very liberal attitude to self-moderate, which led him to reject well loved sovereignty and universal suffrage. Soon appeared the first volumes of “History of the Revolution of 1789-1795″ (5 vols, 1853-1879), which caused the historian of his time in public quite a stir. Sybel 1856 followed a chair at the University of Munich, where he founded the seminary and in 1859 the historic “Historical Journal” called into being, which appears today. In the same year he founded with his former teacher Ranke the “Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences”, which he at first as secretary until 1886, then served as president.
During this academic career Sybel had received his political commitment even with the stoppage of the revolution up in 1848. He was a member of the House of the Estates in 1850 the Erfurt Union Parliament have been. Sybel went from Munich in 1861 at the University of Bonn, where he taught until his appointment as director of the Prussian State Archives in 1875. In 1875 he also appeared as a regular member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Sybel was 1888 also instrumental in founding the “Royal Prussian Historical Station” (from 1890: “Royal Prussian Historical Institute in Rome”) when, with whom he development of the source edition “Monumenta Germaniae Historica” promoted much, like the “Repertory Germanicum “and oversaw the publication of the papal nuncio von Sybel reports to date is one of the tasks of the institute.
Similarly, Sybel oversaw the publication of the source series “Acta Borussica”. The political activity of the historian is now focused entirely on the Prussian policy: In the years 1862-1864 Sybel sat in the Prussian House of Deputies. During the formation of the North German Integration under Prussian leadership in 1867 he was elected in the Constituent Reichstag. With German unification in 1871 from 1874 to 1880 he was again represented in the Prussian House of Deputies. In line with its political orientation of Prussia was Sybel was a leading exponent of substantiated by Johann Gustav Bernhard Droysen small German-Borussian historiography, which the leadership of Prussia legitimized in the small German state historically, as they had prevailed with Bismarck’s unification in 1871.
In this perspective, the appearance of the monumental work “The reasoning of the German Empire by William I.” As (7 vols, 1889-1894) considered that the historian was able to end shortly before his death.
Sybel, died on 1 Dignified 1895 in Marburg.
Major historian of the history of mankind
Portrait of the Month Dignified 2005: Heinrich Karl Ludolf von Sybel
